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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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378 |
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| AUSCHWITZ: THE RACIAL CURE |
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Mengele’s anti-Semitism was both sweeping and
immediate. Among SS doctors, according to Dr. B., Mengele would speak
derisively of catering too much to Jewish inmates and of Auschwitz becoming a
“Jewish sanitorium.” Dr. Magda V. said, “I think really he hated
us” and “treated Jews like laboratory animals — not quite
human” because “we were really biologically inferior in his
eyes.”
Ideologues like Mengele can appear to be “cold
cynics” in that they need not feel others’ pain if it is in the
service of a “higher purpose.” They can also have pockets of
pragmatism for the same reason — certainly the case with Mengele. Nor is
ideological fanaticism incompatible with personal ambition. While Mengele might
have been a “good soldier” for the SS (as Dr. B. put it), one who
lacked “fake SS ambitions,” we know him to have had very real
ambitions that had to do with his ideology and with his overweening desire to
become recognized as a great scientist.
Few would question. Dr.
Nyiszli's observation concerning "so much cynicism" and "so much evil" in
Mengele, or his verdict on him as "a criminal doctor."56 But that cynicism and criminality, the numbing
and the omnipotence — all these were bound up with what all too many
people in Germany and elsewhere at the time experienced as a compelling, even
ennobling vision of the future. |
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| The Ultimate Auschwitz Self: Physician-Killer-Researcher
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More than any other SS doctor, Mengele realized himself in
Auschwitz. There he came into his own — found expression for his talents,
so that what had been potential became actual. Intelligent but hardly an
intellectual giant, Mengele found expression and recognition in Auschwitz
beyond his talent. The all-important Auschwitz dimension was added to his prior
psychological traits and ideological convictions to create a uniquely intense
version of the Auschwitz self as physician-killer-researcher.
Mengele
took hold of and maximized the omnipotent authority held by any SS doctor in
Auschwitz. He could give a forceful and flowing performance in displaying that
omnipotence because it blended so readily with the traits and ideology he
brought to the camp. In Auschwitz, Mengele was the “right man in the right
place at the right time.” His energies no less than his ambition were
galvanized by this Auschwitz synchronization of all his faculties. Hence the
comment by a prisoner (quoted earlier) that “he always had the air of
… [a] man …doing his job and doing it well and [who] hasn’t got
the slightest doubt about the job.” Or as Dr. Jan W. put it: “This
was his big thing there, his Auschwitz, and he enjoyed doing it.”
However atypical for an SS camp doctor, Mengele became the spirit of
Auschwitz, the one most in tune with the place, an example for others. That is
why he was chosen by Wirths and Weber (despite his conflicts with the former)
to be Delmotte’s mentor, the person who could convince this reluctant
doctor of the virtue and necessity of doing selections. And that |
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THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
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